Epipen Hearings

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Call it political grandstanding for constituents, or call it further evidence of a society's frustration and anger with rising healthcare costs and corporate excess, but watching the Congressional hearings into the Epipen fiasco has been fascinating at times as both the Left and the Right actually agree on something.......

Mylan’s Chief Is Chastised by Lawmakers Questioning EpiPen Pricing

Members of Congress on Wednesday pelted the chief executive of Mylan, the company behind the EpiPen, the treatment for severe allergy attacks, with questions about steep price increases on the product and accused her of turning her back on families that could no longer afford the lifesaving treatment.

The chief executive, Heather Bresch, was the latest in a string of drug company leaders to be interrogated by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as public outrage has grown over the rising cost of drugs.

Some lawmakers even expressed frustration that the scene on Wednesday seemed all too familiar, with little evidence that the interrogations were yielding results.

“I’m concerned that is a rope-a-dope strategy,” Representative Elijah E. Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in his opening statement. “The industry will take their punches. But then they go right ahead and keep raising their prices.”

Ms. Bresch defended her company’s practices, referring to oversize charts and an EpiPen. She said the public had overlooked Mylan’s efforts to expand access to EpiPens, such as distributing thousands of them free to schools.

“It troubles me greatly that the EpiPen product has become a source of controversy,” she said in her opening remarks.

“Price and access exist in a balance, and we believe we have struck that balance,” she said.

Lawmakers queried Ms. Bresch on everything from her pay — which she said was about $18 million — to the mode of transportation she used to travel to Washington, D.C.

“You flew on a private jet,” said Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, Democrat of New Jersey.

“I did,” Ms. Bresch answered.

The hearing came after weeks of public complaints over the company’s decision to raise the list price on EpiPen, for a pair of the devices, to more than $600 today from around $100 in 2007. Similar hearings were held in the last year with executives from Turing Pharmaceuticals and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, companies that also sharply raised prices on some drugs.

Critics have accused Mylan of price gouging because it controls most of the market for a lifesaving product for people who are at risk of a potentially deadly allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis.

The company has gone on the defensive, offering patients additional assistance with out-of-pocket costs and announcing that it would begin selling a generic version of the product at half of the cost.

But those moves failed to mollify critics, and several members of Congress ordered the company and Ms. Bresch to answer questions about Mylan’s actions. On Tuesday, the West Virginia attorney general said his office was investigating Mylan over potential antitrust violations and accusations that it may have overcharged the state Medicaid program for the product.

At the hearing on Wednesday, several lawmakers said that the actions Mylan had taken so far were not good enough and that measures like expanding discount cards and patient-assistance programs — which are tied to a family’s income — did not go far enough.

“A lot of these people don’t have those discounts,” said Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They are regular, middle-class people, and they don’t have that discount.”

“But in a way, you’ve done us a favor,” he said, “by showing us what’s wrong with the health care system.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/busin ... .html?_r=0

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